Monday, July 20. 2015

Note: an interesting handmade book initiative by Garnet hertz around the makers movement, from their critical point of view. Not critical thinking or design therefore, but critical make. I would even prefer to say "make thinking"!

"Critical Making is a handmade book project by Garnet Hertz that explores how hands-on productive work ‐ making ‐ can supplement and extend critical reflection on technology and society. It works to blend and extend the fields of design, contemporary art, DIY/craft and technological development. It also can be thought of as an appeal to the electronic DIY maker movement to be critically engaged with culture, history and society: after learning to use a 3D printer, making an LED blink or using an Arduino, then what?"

In traditional sensors the connectors are laid out in a grid and when one part of the grid is damaged you lose sensitivity in a wide swathe of other sensors. This system lays the sensors out like a star which means that cut parts of the sensor only effect other parts down the line. For example, you cut the corners off of a square and still get the sensor to work or even cut all the way down to the main, central connector array and, as long as there are still sensors on the surface, it will pick up input.

The team that created it, Simon Olberding, Nan-Wei Gong, John Tiab, Joseph A. Paradiso, and Jürgen Steimle, write:

This very direct manipulation allows the end-user to easily make real-world objects and surfaces touch interactive,
to augment physical prototypes and to enhance paper craft. We contribute a set of technical principles for the design of printable circuitry that makes the sensor more robust against cuts, damages and removed areas. This includes
novel physical topologies and printed forward error correction.

You can read the research paper here but this looks to be very useful in the DIY hacker space as well as for flexible, wearable projects that require some sort of multi-touch input. While I can’t imagine we need shirts made of this stuff, I could see a sleeve with lots of inputs or, say, a watch with a multi-touch band.

Don’t expect this to hit the next iWatch any time soon – it’s still very much in prototype stages but definitely looks quite cool.

Thursday, October 03. 2013

Note: Makezine is currently running a useful online program (tutorials, explorations, projects, etc. --Sept. 24 - Oct. 15) for a couple of weeks about the "make" approach that is typical of the magazine, this time linked to the "civic" use of urban sensors. Obviously, we should quickly multiply these kind of initiatives to offer alternatives approaches if we don't want to end up into big corporate/monetized monitored cities...

- Join our Urban Sensor Hacks Google+ community and connect with makers from all over who are exploring the world around them using off-the-shelf tech and their own ingenuity.

- Discover how sensor-based applications help us understand the urban environment and how people interact within it.

- Learn how sensor platforms make it easy and affordable to build and deploy numerous sensors in urban areas.

- Get started creating sensor-based applications to experiment and learn about the world you live in.

Upcoming online sessions:

10/3 – Sean Montgomery, Kipp Bradford – Bio-Sensing: Feeling the Pulse of a City. At the heart of urban life are people — what they do and communicate, how they think and feel. Bio-sensing is opening a window into people’s behaviors and motivations in a way that will change nearly every aspect of our lives from health to education to retail experience. Learn how you can hack the bio-sensing revolution and change the way you look at yourself and people around you.

10/8 – Tim Dye, Michael Heimbinder, Iem Heng, Raymond Yap – Join the AirCasting crew as they guide you through a step by step process for building your own air quality monitor, discuss the challenges involved in achieving accurate measurements, and detail their work with grassroots groups and schools to conduct environmental monitoring and advance STEAM education.

10/10 – Tomas Diez – Smart Citizen: The largest crowdsourced sensor platform and community on earth. How can we use the information that is surrounding us to improve our cities? Can I become a sensor in my city? Can communities make their neighbourhoods better by sensing and acting in their environment? Smart Citizen tries to tackle these questions by developing an open source and easy-to-use sensor kit connected with an online platform and mobile app. The projects starts with environmental sensors to capture data about air pollution, sound, temperature and humidity in the urban environment, but will grow to more applications in relation with energy, agriculture, health, and its use in the Internet of Things ecosystem. More about Smart Citizen.

Abour Maker Sessions:

Making and hacking: Live online events using a Google Plus community to bring together makers online and at physical locations for hacking and making. Maker Sessions are organized around a theme or a purpose – to look at technologies that enable new applications and to encourage people of all skill levels and interests to participate in the development of ideas and applications.

Hacking the hackathon: Bring makers together where they live and work – at home, at a university or at makerspaces. Explore opportunities to do something cool – something that perhaps nobody else is doing. Learn from master makers about an application area and discover cool maker projects.

fabric | rblg

This blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research.

We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings.

Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations.

This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.